Botanists Wanted
Hurry-up! NASA is looking for people who want to be part of a one-year mission in a habitat that will simulate life on another planet. The goal is to better understand and prepare astronauts for the physical and emotional obstacles they will experience on future human spaceflight missions to the Moon and Mars. According to the space agency, the habitat will mimic the challenges of a mission, including resource limitations, equipment failure, communication delays, and other environmental stressors. And yes, botany and other fields within biological sciences, along with engineering, mathematics and physics, are welcomed.
I’m not an expert in the field, but just from thinking about Commander Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks in Apollo 13) extracting the last drop of energy from an early-version space ship, deep-sea oil driller Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis in Armageddon) planting a nuclear weapon on a killer asteroid, or botanist Mark Watney (Matt Damon in the Martian) growing potatoes in human…human…let’s move on, I conclude that NASA is looking for creative people.??
Creativity, or the ability to create, involves using our imagination to transform new ideas into a reality that adds value, as simple as that. And make no mistake, we all are born creative. In “Breakpoint and Beyond”, Dr. George Land and Dr. Beth Jarman highlight that in 1968, a creativity test used by NASA to select innovative engineers and scientists was given to 1,600 five-year-olds. The same children were re-tested when they were 10, 15 and more than 25 years old. Whereas 98% of five-year-old children scored in the “highly creative” range, only 2% managed to do the same as adults. This prompted Land and Jarman to conclude that non-creative behavior is learned.
Sir Ken Robinson has a good idea why this happens. In “Do schools kill creativity?”, one of the most viewed TED Talks of all time, he talks about how our education system suppresses creativity in children in two main ways. First, the traditional hierarchy, with math and language at the top, social sciences in the middle and arts at the bottom, might have worked during the industrial revolution of the 19th century but doesn’t seem to do the trick anymore. Times have changed and jobs demand now a great deal of imagination and creativity. And second, children get unprepared to come up with anything creative as a result of being rewarded for not making mistakes. It's no surprise that as people become older, they turn less inventive and prefer to be told what to do rather than incur the inherent dangers of creativity.
But don’t stress, this can be fixed. In “Creativity: The Psychology of Discovery and Invention”, renowned psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi sets forth a comprehensive process to lead us toward more creative lives. I would summarize it in three main steps, starting with the cultivation of curiosity by writing down each day what surprised us and how we surprised others. We will begin to notice a pattern of interest emerge in the notes as we relive these events, one that may indicate an area that merits further investigation.
If we don't learn to enjoy being interested, the resurgence of curiosity won't last for long. Thus, the second step entails establishing a self-sustaining pursuit of new experiences and knowledge by setting a clear objective to look forward to every morning. To keep enjoying anything, we must make it more complex; else, it will become boring. And of course, after our creative energy is awakened, it will be necessary to protect it with new habits such as making time for reflection.
The third and final step is to integrate this process into our personality. This requires not just learning new attention patterns, but also developing what we lack. On the latter, it's a good idea to think about our most apparent trait, the one that our friends and family would use to define us. After we uncover it, we can attempt its opposite. By seeing the world from a fresh viewpoint, we can try new things and thus, greatly enhance our creativity.
Going back to our movie heroes, I can only imagine how relieved they would have felt if three of the most creative real-life space superstars, Caroline Herschel (1750-1848), Henrietta Swan Leavitt (1868-1921) and Vera Rubin (1928-2016), had been there to help them overcome adversity. Herschel discovered several comets despite the basic telescopes of the 1700s and her lack of vision in one eye. Her first display of creativity was probably years before, when she had to work around her mother who opposed her education and instead was adamant on making Caroline useful in domestic duties. Leavitt came up with the idea of comparing the luminosity of a star, for which the distance is known, to the brightness of one further away. The resulting methodology, known as "standard candles", is used today to determine the distance to galaxies billions of light years away. And Rubin noticed a mismatch between the predicted and observed motion of galaxies. Her work not only showed that Newton’s gravity does not apply universally, but also provided the first evidence for the existence of dark matter.
So, next time you hear yourself saying “Houston, we have a problem”, just relax, keep calm and allow your creativity to flow. Make sure to follow Csikszentmihalyi’s process to enhance personal creativity if you “don't want to miss a thing”. And remember that creativity is not only the way out of challenges but especially the path toward new opportunities (…may I suggest the business of organic fertilizers?).
Author: Esteban Polidura, CFA. September 4, 2021.
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Bien Esteban! Perder la creatividad me preocupa más que envejecer ;)